


a rose by any other name (is a choice, is freedom)

by TobermorianSass



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Aftermath, Character Study, Gen, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Unreliable Narrator, but then most of this fic is just implications because what's being obvious anyway, implied force-sensitive finn, metafic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 02:33:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7023208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/pseuds/TobermorianSass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The First Order call him a traitor. That was not his choice. FN-2187 had never been his choice. FN-2187 was a number forced on him to make him their weapon: the faceless soldier.</p><p>Running was his choice. Finn - that was <em>his</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a rose by any other name (is a choice, is freedom)

_Traitor_.

FN-2187 is a traitor. This is an indisputable fact. There are thoughts inside his head that don’t belong to him. Shouldn’t belong to him. They didn’t come from any of the holovids or the speeches or the long sessions where they sit troopers down and ask them the same question over and over again until they get the answers right –

\-- answers he remembers filtering through his dreams at night. _Discipline. Obedience. Order_.

A good trooper can answer these questions in their sleep.

( _Have_ answered these questions in their sleep.)

A good trooper never sleeps. Is never anything less than one hundred per cent vigilant. There are people in the galaxy, somewhere out there, who’d sneak in at night and whisper lies into their heads if they could. A good trooper is loyal even in their sleep. A good trooper knows how to answer these questions even in their sleep.

This is why FN-2187 is a traitor. There are thoughts in his head that shouldn’t belong to him and yet they keep crawling out of the interstices of his life at odd and unpredictable intervals – absurdly thrown in inbetween the lines of one of the General’s twice-a-day speeches, or sometimes while he’s cleaning out garbage chutes, or sometimes when he's in the simulations firing at soldiers and sometimes, late at night with that disembodied voice murmuring ‘ _discipline. obedience. order._ ’ over the comms as they sleep.  

FN-2187 thinks treacherous things like “His voice sounds all funny” and “yeah, yeah we’ve heard that before”. Small things that make him want to laugh when everyone else’s hearts swell with pride. He knows this is a fact and he's acting all wrong, because everyone else's shoulders go straight and their chins tilt up - like on the posters ( _fight for peace, fight for the future: join the First Order today_ ) - but FN-2187 just keeps on eating or walking or doing whatever the hell he’s doing. It’s there, it’s all there in his head; he just doesn’t feel it and everyone knows these things always start off small, never with a bang. 

Small things like: “Those civilians didn’t do anything wrong” ( _we’re wrong, maybe we’re wrong_ ) and “I can’t shoot” ( _I won’t shoot_ ) and “this kind of dying doesn’t feel natural” ( _it’s unnatural_ ).

They all keep adding up. It's in their training manuals. Their sum total is this: FN-2187 is a traitor.

(FN-2187 is a coward. This is why he runs rather than face termination.)

* * *

_Traitor_.

His name is _Finn_  now. He’d shrugged off FN-2187 like an old, tight skin and left him to die in the desert a long time ago.

Maybe he’d been shedding FN-2187 for a long time and that was why his head felt so funny, so full of thoughts that weren’t FN-2187. Maybe _Finn_ had been a long time in the making. Birthing. Something.

 _Run_ , he thinks. Then, _no, Rey_. No, not just Rey. _People_.

 _Finn_.

(Does he get to be _Finn_ , if he won’t listen to the voice he calls _Finn_ that keeps asking him ‘what about the people who stay behind and get shot?’)

 _Finn_ , he thinks. Cautious. Uncertain. The lightsaber feels cold and strange in his hands as Nines comes charging at him, some lingering part of FN-2187 still sitting bone-deep inside him telling him he can’t do this, he can’t swing that lightsaber at Nines. He can’t fight. He can’t win against the First Order. He can’t turn on his squadron. He can’t turn on Nines. He can’t win. He can’t kill – he can’t, _he can’t_ –

Han Solo kills Nines for him.

 _Finn_ , he thinks. _Finn_.

He pries the lightsaber from the hand of a dead ‘trooper. Someone like FN-2187 once was: _disciplined, obedient, ordered._ Someone else who let those words and those long conditioning sessions sink bone deep, who never once had thoughts that weren’t quite theirs. Who never _doubted._ Or maybe they doubted but still went ahead and swallowed it all down.  The dead don’t ever talk about the things they thought that weren't right. Neither do troopers.

Finn grips the lightsaber and feels warmth instead of cold and inside, something starts to uncurl itself from around the base of his spine and he feels –

For the first time he feels like _him_. Unshakeable. Unbendable. Unbreakable.

(Light.)

* * *

_Traitor_.

 _Finn_ , he thinks fiercely. He allows the anger – at the lost years, the lies, the long nights wondering if something was broken in him for caring too much, for being too empathetic, for being _Finn_ , for being everything except the weapon they tried to turn him into – to course through him and feed warmth into him.

 _Rey_ , he thinks fiercely – and allows that pungent, swelling feeling inside his chest (the same feeling he feels thinking about Poe Dameron, about BB-8, about the Resistance, about _Han fragging Solo_ ) to unfurl and shape that anger as he plants himself firmly in the snow in front of Rey.

The lightsaber is warm in his hands.

 _Finn_ is not a traitor. He’s not very brave, but he’s not a scared little boy anymore. He’s not a Stormtrooper: he’s Resistance. Kylo Ren – he knows now who and what Kylo Ren is now. Not a legend, not a myth, not a monster but a man – a boy like him, who killed his father. Who killed Han Solo.

(Han Solo, who saw right through Finn’s lies and let him stay anyway. Han Solo, who could have turned Finn over but chose to accept him anyway. Han Solo, who understood what it meant to _run_ but not to _betray_ but to _become_.)

Kylo Ren looks small by comparison. A boy. A child. A shadow, a monster diminished and reduced. Finn wonders – too many questions, all of them dangerous and all of them _his_ – but he wonders, most of all, why they’d ever let this boy-man, howling like a wounded dog, become the nightmare-monster of their dreams (ever-watching, ever-present).

He thinks: _he’s not so different from the young troopers when they throw tantrums_.

(There’s a difference: repeat offenders are taken away and never come back. Kylo Ren destroys and destroys and they turn the other way.)

His name is _Finn_. He was kidnapped and forced to work for the First Order. He _chose_ to be a member of The Resistance. He’s not very brave, but he’s not broken, he’s not a traitor because you can’t betray something you never chose in the first place. He’s not a traitor, he’s a good man. He’s compassionate. He’s kind. He’s alive. He’s all right. He’s okay – he’s okay, he’s all the things he couldn’t be once upon a time: gentle and loving and scared and angry for himself.

His name is _Finn_ and even if he dies now, he chose it and he’s not afraid – not really, not anymore, not the way he used to be.

**Author's Note:**

> So I rewatched TFA and realized that Finn only really picks up the lightsaber and charges at Kylo Ren when Ren bellows TRAITOR like he's a wounded dog scrapping for a fight and was like "so what if that specifically set him off?" and then this happened.
> 
> Come say hello/yell about star wars shit at me on [tumblr](http://tobermoriansass.tumblr.com/)


End file.
